BANGKOK – My grandmother in Tokyo kept a bucket under her sink. It was filled with what looked like wet sand. But from its sharp depth comes what I considered to be the most miraculous delicacies – a pickled carrot or daikon or, one of my favorites, a bud of a ginger-like plant called myoga.
The bucket contains rice bran, which provides a fermentation bed for a Japanese style of pickled vegetables, known as nukazuke. My grandmother even put her arm in the bucket every day in her 90s and aired the bran.
The yeast bed was my grandmother’s equivalent of a sourdough appetizer, a lesson in ingenuity from a war widow who turned humble ingredients into something delicious.
I do not have to worry about preserving ingredients due to economic backwardness. Still, I took instructions from my grandmother on taste.
At home in Bangkok, I regularly pickle: Texan okra, Hunan long beans, miso garlic and kosher dill. But until the coronavirus pandemic, my job as an international correspondent for The New York Times took a lot of time not to be home. Nukazuke was off limits because it had to serve a homemaker, turn the rice bran or nuka daily so that it did not spoil into a musty mess.
When Thailand just closed its borders this spring, it became clear that I would be an international correspondent without having to comply much with it. And so one of the first things I did was get my hands on some nuka. I added the salt, kelp and vegetable pieces needed to create the right environment for lacto-fermentation and started pickling.
To me, the sour-salty punch of a good nukazuke is a foretaste of home, even though I’ve never lived in Japan, except as a child with my grandmother’s cedar scent, chasing fireflies, watching fireworks and getting into the kitchen. Her pantry was filled with umeboshi, wrinkled pickled plums; young ginger with vinegar; and a brandy perfumed with stickers from which I would steal sips if she did not look.
Of all the senses, taste, inextricably linked to smell and awake scents, is perhaps the most exciting in its ability to conjure up memories of time and place. I’m happy to roam the world, both for work and to play, and my kitchen keeps the abundance of this wanderlust, and lets me jog a globe that has stopped with the pandemic.
My freezer is full of sumac from Istanbul, Sichuan peppercorn from Chengdu and chai masala from Jodhpur. The cabinet has orange flower water from Malta, sardines from Portugal, hot sauce from Belize and first rinse tea from Sri Lanka.
And that does not even take into account the abundance of Thailand, a country of 70 million people that can enjoy different kinds of eggplant and countless varieties of shrimp pasta.
If we can not physically travel, my family can do it at least with every meal, and we are lucky that we can explore the continents at the table.
While we eat, experiences are conjured up: the oysters slurping with green Tabasco at a port town in Namibia; the small crooked octopus stuffed with quail eggs at a Kyoto market; the noodle hand drawn by Uighur Muslims living in exile in Kazakhstan after escaping oppression in China; the reindeer and cheese soup on an island near Helsinki, when the cold rain meant nothing more than ground reindeer and hot cheese.
Also for work, food creates bonds that transcend language and habit. To be a journalist means to constantly intrude, walk into someone’s life and demand sensitive personal data. How did your wife die? When did you have an abortion? What is your faith? Why do you hate your neighbor so much?
Maintenance during these meetings can serve as a peace offering. In 2019, on the island of Basilan in the south of the Philippines, Catholic teachers were horrified by years of deadly rebellious activities with a local Muslim leader participating in a seafood festival. The fiery rice stuffed in sea urchins surpasses matters of faith.
And often I have found that people who have very little are willing to share with a stranger who asks the most penetrating questions.
In eastern Indonesia, an elderly woman, suddenly homeless, looked like an earthquake and a tsunami part of a city, offering rice aromatically with turmeric and lemongrass cooked on an open fire.
In the southwest of China, at the urging of my host in her thatched house, I threw my chopsticks into a honeycomb with bee larvae, fat and juicy.
‘Eat, eat’, said my host, a nutritious refrain that looks all the more so when there is not much food in the area. I ate.
Once, in northern Afghanistan, shortly after the attacks on September 11, a plane flew low and replaced Fig Newtons from the air. Children run forward and tear open the packets, only to wrinkle their noses. I fear that the only people who ate the treats from the American air drop were journalists looking for the sore landscape for shiny packets of cookies.
For the Americans who cover war, the fig delicacies may have produced a foretaste of childhood: a powdery pastry wrapped around a thick jam that keeps the seeds lurking in molars for days to come.
My mother remembers that when she was a child growing up in Japan during the occupation, a fatty American GI offered her a piece of chewing gum. He was so big, she said, and the gums so sweet. Every day, when I grew up in Asia and the United States, I had to drink a long glass of milk so I could grow up like an American.
One day, in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, I dived into a shelter where a group of women were waiting for me in the gloom, away from the men and the dust of refugee life. I reported an article about girls and women who got pregnant as a result of rape by members of the security forces in Myanmar. Gang rape, coupled with the burning of villages and executions, forced more than 750,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar in 2017.
While we were talking, a sister of one of the girls who was pregnant, still in her teens, kept her fingers busy and rolled balls of dough into grains that were no bigger than rice grains. She made a traditional Rohingya dessert that was regularly reserved for religious festivals. The small balls are dried in the sun, fried in butter and then served in sweet milk with cardamom. Making the dessert is labor intensive.
The sister said she was also raped. The girls cry as they remember, wiping their tears on gauze. Someone’s baby is crawling on the ground floor. Then the girls’ hands picked up the dough again, rolling and pinching and shaping, a foretaste of a house they would probably never see again.